1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to impersonating an entity in an access system.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the impact of the Internet continues to alter the economic landscape, companies are experiencing a fundamental shift in how they do business. Business processes involve complex interactions between companies and their customers, suppliers, partners, and employees. For example, businesses interact constantly with their customers—often other businesses—to provide information on product specification and availability. Businesses also interact with vendors and suppliers in placing orders and obtaining payments. Businesses must also make a wide array of information and services available to their employee populations, generating further interactions. To meet new challenges and leverage opportunities, while reducing their overall cost of interaction, many organizations are migrating to network-based business processes and models. One example is the Internet-based E-business model.
To effectively migrate their complex interactions to an Internet-based E-business environment, organizations must contend with a wide array of challenges and issues. For example, businesses need to securely provide access to business applications and content to users they deem authorized. To meet these challenges, E-business host companies have used web access management solutions to secure and manage all the various network based interactions. These systems will authenticate users attempting to access resources protected by the system, and selectively authorize the authenticated users to access one or more of the resources.
Use of prior and existing web access management solutions have given rise to customer service issues. For example, situations exist where entities attempting to access one or more resources protected by the web access management solution are not properly trained to use the web access management system. Therefore, they encounter trouble and are unable to effectively access the appropriate resources. Additionally, a web access management solution may have a bug or other issue that prevents a user from effectively accessing the requested resource. In those situations, as well as many other situations, users may attempt to contact a customer service representative for the entity providing the E-business interface. These customer service representatives need to troubleshoot, debug and verify end user experiences. However, current tools make it difficult for these customer service representatives to do such troubleshooting, debugging and verifying. At best, they can hypothesize about what the user is experiencing and make an educated guess as to a solution.
One attempt to provide a troubleshooting capability included editing functionality for each resource such that the resource will allow an administrator to be considered as a particular end user. The administrator will identify who that administrator is and which end user the administrator wishes to act as. The resource will then treat the administrator as that end user. Several problems have existed with the above described solution. One problem is that this solution requires every resource to be altered to include the additional functionality. One example of a resource is a software application. In some cases, there are many resources being protected and, therefore, the effort to alter each resource is too costly. Furthermore, as new resources are added into the system, those new resources will need to be altered to add the functionality. In some cases, the resources cannot be altered. For example, if a resource is purchased from a third party vendor, the source code may not be provided and, therefore, the resource cannot be altered to add the functionality. Another problem is that this solution is too burdensome on the administrator. That is, if the administrator wants to interact with multiple resources, the administrator may need to authenticate at each resource. In some cases, the administrator needs to know or alter the user's password to be able to perform the troubleshooting, which imposes security risks and privacy issues.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a new means to troubleshoot, debug and verify end user experiences on a network based system for accessing resources.